Listen to This by Alex Ross – review

Walking down to a D ... from Purcell to the Stray Cats. Photograph: Ray Stevenson/Rex Features

Absurd though it may seem, many books about music treat it as an orphan entity with none of the social, historical context that gave birth to it. The joy of Alex Ross's first book, The Rest Is Noise, was the way it broke with this convention. When he discusses Strauss's Salome, for instance, he includes a description of Mahler, Schoenberg and many other 20th-century musical giants attending an early performance, along with the teenage Hitler: this wonderful passage gives us a picture of the glamour and innovation of the early 20th century while acknowledging the shadow that lurked among them, which would lengthen into war and terror.

Listen to This

by
Alex Ross

In his latest offering, Ross liberates music from yet another of its straitjackets – the habit of limiting itself to a single genre. We have, it seems, arrived at a new world order in musicology, where it is not just desirable, but normal, for a virtuoso writer like Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, to simultaneously scale the heights of Brahms or Schubert and listen in wonder to works of Björk or Bob Dylan. And not before time, because all music has the same roots and to define it by "genre" is as useful as grouping humans by their skin colour. These hugely enjoyable and serendipitous essays were written over more than a decade, resulting in a rewarding historical perspective. Ross's rapid-fire discourses on music from very different parts of the musical spectrum create fascinating perspectives. One minute, you're immersed in Mozart, and then suddenly you're on tour with Radiohead and contemplating what it must have felt like for an unworldly Finnish conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, to take the reins of the LA Philharmonic. Reading the book is the literary equivalent of an iPod on shuffle; it offers fresh and unexpected stimulation at every turn.

Ross begins with a phrase that chimes well with me: "I hate classical music." For many years now this term "classical" has been used as a corrective rod by certain of its initiates, and tangible proof of its irrelevance by many others. Of course Ross is not referring to the music itself, but to the name. When he describes "the pince-nez stereotype of classical music", we all know what he's talking about; after I launched my open-air festival, Play the Field, on the Somerset Levels last year, one Outraged of Leamington Spa wrote to me: "Who the hell do you think you are to encourage rowdy audiences, teenagers and toddlers? I shall make a point of never going to any of your concerts. If you want to slum it, you're welcome." Yet it was a hit with the younger audience, one of whom said to me: "I get it now, it's all one music."

In a rapturous chapter on the great black contralto Marian Anderson, ("the voice of the century" for Ross), her legacy is explored both in terms of her voice itself, and what it meant to black America. In 1939 a furious Roosevelt, on hearing that she had been barred from singing at Constitution Hill on account of her colour, requested her hugely symbolic and moving performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Racism infecting art may now seem like an anachronism, yet it is alive and well: after the black South African movie retelling of Carmen (U-Carmen e Khayelitsha, performed by a company that I co-founded) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival in 2005, one of the first questions a journalist asked me was: "Are you trying to make a case for the sex appeal of fat black women?" It's not so far from Ross quoting Miles Davis's reason for quitting the Juilliard School of Music: "No white symphony orchestra was going to hire a little black motherfucker like me."

Ross cites the obervation of philosopher John Dewey of the American habit – every bit as prevalent in the UK – of putting art on a "remote pedestal". For Ross this is wrapped up with the "monastic culture" of the music conservatoire, in which the "outside" world of politics, love, economic crises and scandals are distractions. Certainly as a music student I used to find it baffling that conservatory education seemed to be all about developing one tiny part of the brain – the technical mastery of an instrument – at the expense of all else. Why, if you were passionate about music, would you not also have an interest in politics or history? I share the belief, which is so brilliantly explicated in Ross's writing, that music is a mirror to the human condition, and yet is often made by those with no interest in exploring its constituent parts.

The record industry is also at fault, according to Ross; the cult of the "definitive performance" has done considerable damage. Performers have an almost unassailable edifice in front of them in reaching the expectations of a highly sophisticated listening public. As a result of endless overdubbing in the studio (cleaning up the tiniest details), music can attain a cleanliness and perfection that is frankly inhuman. "When precision is divorced from emotion," writes Ross, "it can become anti-musical, repulsive." It would of course be absurd to condemn all recordings; it's just that some of the most rewarding – for me at least – come from earlier times, when artists were a little less obedient or well-behaved, not in such desperate pursuit of the perceived gold standard. Like me, Ross sees the value of listening to older recordings which enable us to escape the sterile "perfectionist style, rebelling against the letter of the score in pursuit of its spirit".

For Ross the period-instrument movement has done most in this regard, as its best practitioners are free-wheeling iconoclasts. (For evidence of this try out Angelika Kirschlager's breathtaking Bach Arias album, which sounds as if she and her band are jamming something entirely, and bracingly, new.) "If, in coming years, the spirit of the early-music scene enters into performances of the 19th-century repertory, classical music may finally kick away its cold marble façade," he writes.

One strong thread leading us through the eclectic labyrinth of Listen to This is Ross's interest in the walking bass line. From the wild abandon of the 17th-century chacona to the no less wild abandon of Led Zeppelin, he demonstrates how in a minor key, for instance, G walking down to D is a piece of ubiquitous musical DNA down the years, a kind of melancholy calling card. (It stretches all the way from Dido's Lament, in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, to the Stray Cats' "Stray Cat Strut".)

In one of his most exuberant flights of fancy, Ross states: "If a time machine were to bring together some late 16th-century Spanish musicians, a continuo section led by Bach, and players from Ellington's 1940 band, and if John Paul Jones stepped in with the bass line of 'Dazed and Confused', they might, after a minute or two of confusion, find common ground." In fact I tried such an experiment at Glastonbury festival this year (with the essence of long-dead musicians rather than their literal presence); Purcell's short bass lines loop round and round, exactly as electronic dance bass lines do. We sampled several, and clothed them in rampant, dubsteppy psychedelia. Who's to say a bassline is from 1690, or 2010? Purcell's tunes certainly didn't suffer. After all, you can paint the Mona Lisa with a moustache, or stage Don Giovanni in an S&M shop, and you won't do the slightest damage to the original. Great art endures.

This magical mystery tour of a read is also full of piquant phrases. Conductor Riccardo Muti, restraining a singer from self-expression, is described as "tugging him forward, like a parent marching a child past a candy store"; Verdi's writing for voice is "a camera that zooms in on a person's soul"; Dylan is a "lop-sided owl . . . in whose vicinity, I noticed, everyone italicises".

Ross is nostalgic for the time (basically pre-Victorian) when concerts "were eclectic hootenannies". He might have been describing his own book.